English

Can there be peace in Europe?

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Interview for Liberal Culture, January 12, 2016. Polish version here.

Has Chancellor Merkel made a mistake when she opened the door for migrants without first consulting it with other European countries? Can this decision cost her the role of the European leader?

Like all other European leaders Merkel thinks first and foremost about her own domestic politics. Most of the migrants that had become stuck in the central station of Budapest wanted to go to Germany. The German public had been outraged about the French and the British leaving thousands of migrants stranded in Calais, at the entrance of the Channel tunnel. After Merkel had invited the Budapest migrants to Germany, perhaps also to clear the way for a coalition with the Greens in two years, it turned out there were millions more that wanted to come. At this point the German government began to look for a “European solution”. No European government consults with other European governments when it sees its own vital political interests at stake. Weiterlesen →

Politics in the interregnum

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Appeared in ROAR Magazine, December 23, 2015

Professor Streeck, to begin with, could you briefly explain why you believe that capitalism and democracy are in conflict with one another? Is this tension an inherent one, or do you consider it to be a more recent phenomenon?

Democracy: one person, one vote; capitalism: one dollar, one vote. The order of equality vs. the order of egoism (John Dunn). Capitalists as a permanent minority in a majoritarian democratic polity — and democracy ending “at the factory gates”. Social justice vs. the justice of markets. It’s an old story with unending permutations, discussed again and again since the nineteenth century, by legions of scholars and political leaders. Weiterlesen →

The social condition of critical social science

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Presented at the conference „Humanities and the Social Sciences in the Twenty-first Century“ organized by the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), June 15-16, 2015

The presentation will attempt to define critical social science and explore its relationship to practical politics and collective action. It will then examine the different roles contemporary society offers to critical social scientists, after the demise of the figure of “organic intellectual”. It will focus on the situation of a critical social science cut off from political power and influence and under pressure from neoliberal “reforms” of academic scholarship and teaching. It also considers the need for critical social science to assert itself in a pluralist public governed by market laws against the white noise produced by omnipresent mass media, both conventional and new.

Links:
Video (presentation starts around minute 12)
Conference Program [PDF]

Conversation on States and Markets (with Marion Fourcade)

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ASA Economic Sociology Section Newsletter, Fall 2015, pp. 10-16

A perennial question in economic sociology is the relationship between the state and economy, which most economic sociologists conceptualize as co-constitutive. How would you characterize your own take on the relationship between the state and economy, and states and markets? What are some unexplored questions or problems we should be discussing/studying? Where should future research turn?

Wolfgang Streeck: I prefer to speak of either “the state and the market” or “the state and capitalism”. “The market” is shorthand for a mode of governance (free contracts at prices set by supply and demand) while “capitalism” refers to a particular power structure in society (private ownership of the means of production, private accumulation of capital). ”The state and the market” refers to the multifaceted relationship between two modes of allocation (distribution), whereas “the state and capitalism” refers to the equally multifaceted relationship between two different kinds of power (political and economic), or between citizenship and property rights, etc. (…)

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Warum der Euro Europa spaltet statt es zu einigen

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Leviathan, Jg. 43 (2015), Heft 3, 365-386 (Online-Zugriff hier)

Basierend auf einem Vortrag in der Reihe „Distinguished Lectures in the Social Sciences“  am Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, 21. April 2015

Zu den besonders ausführlich behandelten Themen im zweiten Kapitel von Max Webers monumentalem Werk Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, überschrieben “Soziologische Grundkategorien des Wirtschaftens“ (1956 [1920]), gehört das Geld. Für den Soziologen Weber wird Geld zu Geld kraft einer „Verbandsordnung“ (ibid., 54), auch „Geldordnung“ (ibid., 125) oder „Geldverfassung“ (ibid., 145), die unter modernen Bedingungen, so Weber im Anschluss an Knapps Staatliche Theorie des Geldes (1905), nur eine von einem Staat monopolisierte sein könne (ibid., 125). Geld ist eine in einem Herrschaftsverband – ein weiterer zentraler Weberscher Begriff – ein- und durchgesetzte politisch-ökonomische Institution, die wie alle Institutionen bestimmte Interessen privilegiert und andere benachteiligt. Dies macht es zum Gegenstand gesellschaftlichen „Kampfes“ bzw., als wirtschaftliche Institution, zu einer Ressource in dem, was Weber als „Marktkampf“ bezeichnet. (…)

Vortrag und Diskussion als Video hier.

English version

New Left Review, Vol. 95, September-October 2015, pp. 5-26 (access here)

Version française

Contretemps, N° 31, Novembre 2016 (Lire la suite)

Monetary Disunion: The Domestic Politics of Euroland

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With Lea Elsässer, Journal of European Public Policy, 2015

Abstract: Regional disparities within the European Union have always been perceived as an impediment to monetary integration. Discussions on a joint currency were linked to compensatory payments in the form of regional policy. Structural assistance increased sharply at the end of the 1980s. Later, however, it had to be shared with the new member states in the East. Moreover, the low-interest credit that Southern European Monetary Union members enjoyed as a result of interest rate convergence is no longer available. We predict that considerable amounts of financial aid will have to be provided in the future by rich to poor member countries, if only to prevent a further increase in economic disparities. We also expect ongoing distributional conflict between payer and recipient countries far beyond current rescue packages. We illustrate the dimension of the conflict by comparing income gaps and relative population size between the centre and periphery in Europe and in two nation-states with high regional disparities, Germany and Italy.

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(Previously published as Discussion Paper 14/17, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, October 2014 Download [PDF])

Brutish, nasty – and not even short: the ominous future of the eurozone

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Appeared in The Guardian, August 17, 2015

Now the dust has temporarily settled over the ruins of Greece’s economy, it is worth asking if there wasn’t a brief moment when the actors had found a way to cut the eurozone crisis’s Gordian knot. At some point in July German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, appeared to have realised that his dream of a “core Europe” with a Franco-German avant-garde would vanish into thin air if Greece was allowed to remain in the economic and monetary union. Rewriting the rules of the union to accommodate the Greeks, Schäuble realised, would pull the euro southwards, and France, Italy and Spain with it – forever breaking up the European core. (Continue)

Griechenlandkrise: Gefangen in der Eurozone

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Debattenbeitrag für Spiegel Online, 8. Juli 2015. English translation published on Verso Books Blog.

Es gibt noch Fortschritt in Europa. Als der damalige griechische Ministerpräsident Georgios Papandreou 2011 ein Referendum über die Austeritätswünsche seiner europäischen Kollegen abhalten wollte, wurde er von diesen kurzerhand abgesetzt.

Als Nachfolger entsandten Brüssel und Berlin einen gewissen Loukas Papademos, Vertrauensmann der internationalen Finanzindustrie, der Anfang der Nullerjahre als griechischer Zentralbankchef mithalf, sein Land mit Hilfe von Goldman Sachs Euro-würdig zu rechnen. So etwas ging diesmal nicht – dank eben jener Restbestände nationaler Demokratie, die die deutschen Europhilen zugunsten einer zukünftigen „europäischen Demokratie“ suspendieren wollen. Weiterlesen →